Category Archives: Marketing

When we talk about forums, there are two main areas. Inbound and outbound. Inbound is where people are coming into your website and using a forum on your website. This can be difficult to start and manage. It works best for areas that need tech support.

If there’s many people coming to ask questions, and a forum is an easier way to answer the questions rather than individual e-mails. A great example of this is bytes for all . They have a forum as their main website.

Because so many people want to make changes and have problems, it’s a perfect setup. They come there and get their answers or get the help they need and there is a soft sell for the premium products. There is also a soft sell for premium membership in the forum. Forums require supervision. A moderator needs to monitor the postings to make sure there is no negative publicity, anger in some cases clarify the posts made by the visitors. It’s even good idea to have several monitors in different time zones to monitor the entire process.

A non-technical forum, like marketing, is hard to get started. Because if there’s not enough visitors and questions asked, that when people come to the forum they think it’s dead and leave. So it takes a certain amount of postings to get to a level where the forum is generating good traffic.

Out bound forums are forums that other people host on their website. This can be an excellent source of business intelligence. You can learn a great deal about your competitors, you can learn what people are saying about your products or services and you can learn about the prospects or customers.

A forum is a great way to start market research. You can yet feedback about features and user preferences. Forums that are narrowly focused provide the best opportunities for learning and discussing your market.

This is also a place where you can build your brand. If you spend time in the forum answering questions in helping people, this will build a reputation for your products and services. Often people in these forums are influential people, and can direct prospects to your website. Often people will go to these forums looking for advice from the regulars who post there. If you have a reputation on that forum, then people will recommend you.

This will also help your search engine marketing. Search engines will detect that you are being recommended and send more traffic. It’s important to invest time in the forums for posting any links to your website. People are very sensitive to spam me links. It’s important to develop the relationship first.

In this article were using that term forum as a generic model. This would really apply to any questions and answer website. Be sure to evaluate the audience carefully before you invest time. For instance Yahoo answers would not have quality prospects for most websites. Linkedin, Quora and others are much more professional.

Some businesses use the forums as a primary tool of marketing. We recommend you use it carefully is a mixture of marketing methods.

I’m amazed how many people contact me asking how to integrate social media into their marketing plan. They read so much about social media and now they want to put it front and center on their plan.

They want to use social networking as the tool that brings in all this new business to their company. But, our philosophy here is research. With proper research and then we can determine the proper plan.

A new report from MarketingSherpa shows where we should put our priorities.

The two areas that make the most difference are organic search and e-mail marketing.

As you can see from this chart, social media ads are almost worthless. Social media is probably one of the worst return on investments a website owner can make. Now that’s not to say that some industries might do very well in social media. If you’re selling cosmetics to teenage girls, social media might be the right place for you. If you have a Non-Profit organization, social media or Facebook is one of the best places you can be. But for the vast numbers of website owners, organic search and e-mail marketing should be their strategic plan.

For a long time we have said that paid search does not convert well. It’s the least attractive way to get traffic to your website. And that traffic stops the minute you stop advertising.

People should use their time and money wisely and build a website that is going to deliver organic search traffic over the long term. They should take the time and build a strategic plan that incorporates offers to get e-mail addresses. With an e-mail database, you increase the conversions and profits.

An e-mail list reminds people that you’re still in business a year later. Done properly it can incorporate the successful methods of drip marketing.

It requires more work to have an e-mail list. It requires more work to put together a plan, a strategy for your clients. It’s more work to think about and research about the type of people who use your product and services. We break those people down into market segments, and then develop e-mail list to those segments, we will have even more success. These numbers in this research are averaged. There are some who were doing much higher in organic search and e-mail marketing.

It our recommendation that website owners not use social media for a megaphone about their business. Social media can be a valuable research tool, to learn what your prospects or customers are talking about. It’s a good way to learn what’s important to them. But it’s not a good way to sell them.

This chart in the research behind it covers hundreds of websites. Let’s not ignore this valuable research. Let’s stop wasting time promoting our products and social media.

Contact us today to discuss how we can work together with you on a strategic plan for your website.

Several things are needed for a successful website. One form of strategy is research.
Here is a basic overview of how research can form the basis of the website.

1) Determine the goals of the website. This is not as obvious as it looks. Often the goals of the website change. As the market conditions change, or the business change, the website needs to reflect that.

2) Decide which products goods or services best lead to these goals. Sometimes a unique or low-priced item is the best to lead in the website display.

3) Decide the minimum market share that is needed need in these products to produce satisfactory profit and return on investment. Sometimes a small amount of a very large market can be enough to produce a good return on investment. But we need to look and see if we can realistically generate the traffic to support this minimum market share.

4) Determine a pricing strategy that would best lead to this profit and return on investment. There are many different choices in a pricing strategy. A pricing strategy may make or break a company on Internet marketing. If were providing software, and our prices $24 per month, and our competition offers free services for under 10 users, then we need to carefully consider our pricing strategy.

5) Forecast probable demand for several years. Often people are only thinking in short term results. But we need to forecast for the longer term as well.

6) Decide the best distribution channels to produce continuous satisfactory sales and profits. The distribution chain is very different with the Internet. Various levels can be eliminated with the Internet. Walmart buys directly from China, and imports the products to the home country. They bypass the exporter, the importer and the distributor. This is one way they can offer such low prices. But today it’s possible for the average consumer to buy direct from China through the eBay channel. So there are many distribution channels to choose from. Sometimes mold will channels are better.

7) Decide on the best promotional strategy. One effective strategy for Internet marketing is free shipping. But we need to look at all the different possibilities and promotion.

8) Anticipate problems that may arise as these decisions are implemented. As part of our plan if we could have contingencies or backup plans, this will also increase our odds of success.

At the end of 2012 there are 200 million websites to choose from. Only those who have invested in a plan will have traffic.

The plan is to most important part of the website. Often the plan could be multifaceted, or multiple plans depending on the audience.

Contact us today to determine the best brand for your website. We can show you how to research and create a plan that increases the value of your website.

People often come to us with the website that has no plan. And they don’t understand why they don’t have much Google traffic.

When we ask them, who are their potential customers, they have indefinite answers.

Sometimes they say anybody between the ages of 18 and 70 who is hungry. That may be okay for McDonald’s, but that does not work very well for the Internet. The Internet is an area of specialization. People want to do business with specialty firms and not general firms. Google wants to provide traffic to experts, not generalists.

Ideally, market research should be done to determine who the potential clients are for the products and services. Once we determine that, then we need to do additional research to find out what these people really want. Often the things they want most are unknown to the website owners. They have a general idea of what they ASSUME people want. But, the more research we have about the specific wants and desires, the more successful the website can be. Then we could make a plan tailored to the wants and desires of the potential customers.

The term marketing, is a term that defines this research and a plan. Achieving goals depends on knowing the needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfactions.

If we don’t know specifically the wants and needs of our potential customers, were stabbing in the dark. And Google is not going to send much traffic for people who were stabbing in the dark.

Many website owners don’t even have goals. What’s the goal of your website? Well, we want to sell more golf clubs. That’s not a goal. That’s a dream. That’s a wish. But it’s not a goal.

We can’t have realistic goals, unless we’ve done some market research and have an idea of what people want or need. Then, we can develop a marketing plan that meets those wants and needs.

Often people just create a bunch of content, that they think people will like, maybe they like, and post it on their website. They do this in an attempt to attract more people to the website. But what type of people are they trying to attract? Are these the correct people we really want? Are they really are ideal customers?

This is why we need a marketing plan. The basis of the marketing plan is to determine who the potential clients are. Part of that process is really to pick the best clients. The best clients may be the most profitable ones. They may be the ones who are easiest to please. They may be the ones who are closest to us. The website owner has to set the criteria to determine who is the best.

If you are a business that wants to sell maternity clothes, you need to decide who your target market is. Younger Muslim women are going to have very different wants and needs than women from Southern California who read Cosmo. So, every website has to have a marketing plan.

Sooner or later, in order to be successful, you need a marketing plan.It’s best if we create the marketing plan before the website is even started. But that rarely happens. Normally it’s an afterthought because Google is not sending any traffic.

Primary data is the data that you collect yourself. This is the most expensive data.

Secondary data is that which is collected by other people. Sources of secondary data may be, industry associations, specialty companies who sell the data, like marketing companies and others. Secondary data is almost always cheaper to purchase.

By gathering primary data, when secondary data is available, you are reinventing the wheel. However with the changes taking place on the Internet, gathering data is becoming cheaper.
Conversely secondary data is also becoming cheaper. Some people are sharing their data for free, through webinars seminars, free reports and article marketing. Sometimes, the free data is limited, but often it gives enough insight into the data to draw conclusions.

There are more and more companies providing secondary data as a service. Internet browser statistics are available at various places. Many sources of data are just a search engine search away. Some of it is generalized and not specific enough for the market you’re trying to service.

Sometimes it is beneficial to have both primary and secondary data. It’s possible to compare primary data to see if you’re within or exceeding industry norms. A typical example would be bounce rates. Knowing what the bounce rates are for your industry, would be helpful in comparison to your website.

The most common form of primary data today is web statistical analytics. It’s possible to have several types of analytics programs monitor one website. From that, a large amount of primary data can be collected.

A good example of secondary data is Wikipedia. our post on Country Debit Problems , shows how it is possible to use Wikipedia data to produce link bait.

Marketing is information about the customer or consumer, or visitor or prospect. It’s the information about the person you are selling to or want to sell to.

The research portion is the data collection, the analysis and reporting of the information. It’s that simple. Market research is gathering information about the people who are selling to or want to sell to.

It’s an extremely simple concept. Yet, it’s one that many businesses avoid. Some are afraid of it. Some don’t know how to do it. Some don’t think it’s necessary for their business.

In the area of Internet marketing, market research is extremely important. The days of just building website and throwing a bunch of information on it are over. We need to understand that Google has changed the rules. In order to get good search results, we have to have websites that people really want to use.

This was important before, but now Google has made it a priority.

In a traditional business, what’s important is location. If you have a good location you’re going to get traffic into your store. But with the new Internet economy, to get traffic into your online store, you have to do your marketing research.

One of the first questions we ask is, what is it your prospects, suspects, or customers want?

But before we can answer that, we have to define who is we’re talking about. Because in the online world we have to be very narrowly focused. Our visitors can come from all of the world. They want to view your specific information about their interests.

So, we need to know who they are. What nationality, what age group, what income group, what social group, what demographic? Now, we can’t know all of this about our visitors. At least not at first. And sometimes when people see this they become overwhelmed. Where do I start? There so much information.

We start anywhere we can. We gather any information we can gather and try to organize it. That’s the process of market research. We try to understand who our visitors are now. What target markets we might want to work on? Who our past customers are?

As we go through the steps of market research, we’ll learn how to find out all that we can about our visitors. The better we can define these visitor and categorize them, the more successful our website will be.

This is not a one-time job. This is an ongoing project, they can start at any time and continue for the life of the website. The more we know about our visitors, the easier it is to produce content they want.

What people want to today is relationships. Almost every city at one time or another had a discount appliance store. Today they’re gone. Circuit City is gone. Best Buy is on its way out. Borders Books is gone, JCPenney is on the ropes, Sears/Kmart is struggling to hang on. The one thing all of the stores have in common is they’re living in the past. They think of the world as a transaction. If we have the best price, the top name brands, a good selection, people will buy from us. In the past that was true. But what people want today is a relationship with their suppliers.

When I login my Amazon.com account, there are recommendations for me, there are wish lists that I have started that I can browse. They’re all sorts of tools that help me in purchasing what I want to buy there. Reviews, choices, sometimes the choices are outside the Amazon network. But I have a relationship with Amazon. It’s not a one-time transaction. In fact the reason I buy books from Amazon, is because of their recommendations. They know what I’m interested in.

People want to reward companies that understand them and have products and services specifically for them.

When we design website, we have to design the content with the visitor in mind. Instead of just putting out content about us, our business, our products, we need to understand what people want. This is what marketing is all about. Find out what your visitors want, and provide that for them. Determine who your best prospects are, who your customers are, what they want, what they need and then provide that kind of content for them.

So, when they come to the website they see information specifically geared to their needs. They feel comfortable that the company understands their needs.

This is pull marketing. Where people are drawn to the website because of the content. As opposed to push marketing we’re telling the people how great we are with television ads, radio ads, print media and almost every other media. Often people transition this method to the website. The push marketing does not work very well. Pull marketing works very well.

Google understands this form of marketing. And they’ve decided to measure the websites quality based upon how the viewers respond on the website. If the visitors like the website and move around the website and spend time on it, then Google gives it high marks. If not, if they just common read an article and leave, Google gives it low ratings.

So, the challenge is to build the website that people want to use. Sometimes we know what people want. Other times we have to do market research to determine what they want. The most important thing is we have to focus on who it is we want service, and then provide content for them.

At seoplannow we can guide you on marketing, market research and conversion. Contact us today for a free quote.

1) If people Google your name, they should be able to find it easily. The name of the firm should be at the top of the results. All the partners should come up at the top of the results if their names are googled as well.

2) You want to be able to build contact list from the website. You want to expand your contacts and relationships with people. This is the most important step in all Rainmaking. To do that, you need a reason for people to subscribe to an e-mail list. We have more on that in e-mail marketing.

Some experts proclaim the entire reason for the website, is to build an e-mail list. More advance marketers will have multiple e-mail lists. Different ones for different topics or interests. For instance, if you’re in the medical malpractice field, you may have to Lists. One for doctors and their interests. Another for hospitals and their interest.

3) A major goal website is to build your brand. Essentially what that means is, that you want to establish yourself as an expert or leader in the field. The website can give the firm and individual attorneys credibility and establish their authority in the field. By effectively using blog posts the attorneys become published. This brings credibility just as publishing a book would do. People can read the blogs and build confidence in the firm and individual attorneys.

4) A major problem in the world today with websites is trust. We want to establish a strong bond of trust as soon as possible. In the design of the website we want to include trust marks and do things that engender trust. Photos of the attorneys and office help build this trust. People do not want to do business with the law firm’s. They want to do business with people. It’s a relationship were trying to establish. Everything we do should be to build this bond of trust and relationship.

5)We want to remove or eliminate any fancy artwork that does not fit above parameters. Flash videos, stock photos, fancy logos do not accomplish our goals.

6) Why should people come to our website? They are seeking information. When the search on Google for information, and they click to come to the website, they’re expecting to get information. They want to learn about a topic. Sometimes, they don’t know specifically what they want. It’s important that we provide them quality information. So, when they read an article they learn something. We want articles with substance. This can be about case law on a particular topic, it can be about news events of topic, it can be about concerns in the industry about a topic.

7) We need to have meaningful analytics (statistically gathering programs) on the website. We have people who can monitor those statistics and recommend improvements to the website. Analytics are the feedback on the website. People are not going to call and say what a wonderful website you have. Analytics tell us what they like and what they don’t like. They tell us where they came from, how long they stayed, and where they went.

8). Navigation on the website is important. We want people to be able to see what else we have to offer when they come in on a search term. The easier the navigation, the more relevant the navigation is to searchers, the more time they’ll spend on the website. The more time they spend, the stronger the trust bond becomes.

9) A good call to action is important. Where it’s placed is important. There can be more than one. When people come to our website, what do we want them to do? That’s the call to action. Do we want them to subscribe to an e-mail list, ask a question, or whatever we want them to do. The call to action steers them along the path.

10) Differentiate or die. We will be different than the other websites. We want to be different than the competitors. We want to highlight or focus on our areas of expertise. People today want experts. They want people who are specialized in certain categories. So it’s good to pick and focus on those categories for the website. By surveying the competition we can see how to differentiate our law firm from the others. Sometimes we want to pick the most profitable areas. Sometimes we may want to pick a narrow specialty area in order to attract a specific group of people in a competitive marketplace. Using medical malpractice as an example, we may want to focus a section on birth anomalies and their legal impact. By creating many articles in this category, we establish ourselves as an expert in this area and in the medical malpractice area.

11) We want to identify what geographic areas we will work in. People want to know this early on.

12) Consistency is very important. We want to publish on a regular basis. Google is keeping track, and this keeps our website fresh. Once a week is a good schedule, once a month is a minimum. Many people start out strong in this area, and fade later. We have far too many hares have not enough tortoises. Consistency over a number of years pays dividends.

Creating a great website requires a team effort. Now more than ever it’s important to have a great website. Google can tell. They monitor the feedback from the chrome browser and android phone in the Google toolbar. So it’s important to have a great website.

Great websites make money. It takes more time and effort to create a great website, but the return on investment is much higher.

We have assembled a team roster, so that people can get a better understanding of what’s required to build a modern site. These are all the roles. Sometimes one person can fill many roles. Some roles are only used on occasion like an info-graphic.

By understanding these roles, a website owner and manager can better manage the website and the construction process. Some of these roles are critical. Like the marketing, project coordinator and SEO.

Many positions can be outsourced, some overseas. As long as there is adequate supervision the whole process will work well.